OjodePez #13, edited by Aaron Schuman

Article: Nada que Declarer (Nothing to Declare)
By: Richard Mosse
Link

I was driving east of San Diego, near a little town called Tecate near the Mexican border, when I came across something by the side of the road. It's a habit of mine, or a problem of mine more like. I often spot the things that are not the important things. They're the kind of things that make me ask questions. So I pulled over and it was a little red backpack, dusty and forgotten. I looked around. I waited and listened -- no one was around. So I opened it up and found keys, two tins of refried beans, analgesic gel, insect repellent, a woman's clothes, little pink shades, a card for an English language training course in Fresno, loads of jewellery, and a small Spanish bible. Mysteriously, there were also two plastic bags full of metal ball bearings, and a used candle, which also had some ball bearings pressed into the candle wax. I have never solved this mystery, and to this day I do not know why the bag contained ball bearings.

The bag told a story -- a very sad story. It was obviously a woman's, maybe with kids because there were little kids toys in there too, such as a plastic toy cell phone. So I took a photograph. And then I put everything back in the bag, zipped it shut, and was packing up my camera when an old Jeep made its way down a dusty side road. It pulled up, and there was an aging hippy woman inside with a topless young surfer dude with a beautiful tan. They looked like something out of a movie. I asked them about the bag, whether they knew whose it was. The guy seemed more interested in my camera. 'oh, probably illegals,' said the hippy woman with lovely long hair. 'They come through here all the time. Every night, they're on the move.'

I worked that road for a few more hours, looking for other bits that might have been left behind by 'illegals'. I pulled my rental car onto the side of the road and was scanning around when a great white Ford F-150 pickup, with Border Patrol written across it, pulled over in a hurry. A Hispanic fellow in a uniform jumped out, glowered at me, and sprinted off into the bushes, up a steep arroyo. I'm not sure what he saw, but I didn't see it.

Several months later, I returned to the American south-west to continue looking for anything that might point to the journey made by the 'illegals'. It was my fourth visit to the region, and this time I chose to visit the Sonoran Desert, said to be the most popular route for illegal immigrants into the United States. It's particularly busy in the month of February, when they are returning after a long Christmas holiday in Mexico.

I had hired a 4x4 vehicle with a GPS, and had located the notorious El Camino del Diablo, a dirt track leading right across the remotest parts of the Sonoran. I drove for hours and hours, right into the very heart of nowhere. I was hundreds of miles from any paved road or sign of civilization. Yet I found -- at three separate locations -- spent balloons lying in the dust. I figured that perhaps the 'illegals' brought balloons with them on their journey to inflate for pillows when they rest. I couldn't think of any good reason why a child's inflatable paddling aid had made it's way all the way out here into the heart of the dusty desert. Searching for traces of the journey by illegal immigrants, I was struck again and again by pointless mysteries such as this.

While photographing one of the balloons that was struck in a bush, I heard a shout, a Spanish sounding shout, from a hilltop further up the valley. It made me nervous, so I packed up and drove away in a hurry. I have since learned that smugglers station observers on hilltops to watch the movements of the Border Patrol, and to communicate a safe path to their comrades.

While in the Sonoran, I met a vehicle on the single lane track coming towards me. It was another white Ford pickup, a Border Patrol vehicle. I let it pass and noticed that it was dragging a flat plank of wood weighed down with old rubber tires. I couldn't understand what purpose this might serve, so I turned around, chased the pickup down, and asked the driver what he was up to. 'Cleaning the track,' he explained. 'It's so we can see fresh footprints. They have to cross El Camino del Diablo somewhere, and where they do we'll see their footprints. But only if I keep the dirt nice and smooth.' I couldn't believe it.

The Border Patrol are a peculiar bunch. They have a profoundly developed sense of the land, and are trained to read small traces in the brush. In fact, there's a specialist unit comprised of Native Americans known as the Shadow Wolves. They are America's most effective hunters of drugs smuggled in through the desert, and draw on a wealth of ancient Indian tracking techniques. The Shadow Wolves have been sent as far afield as Afghanistan, to train the new Afghan army to track heroin smugglers and Taliban insurgents.

In the hope of meeting members of the Shadow Wolves, I entered an Indian Reservation known as Tohono O'odham Nation. It's illegal to enter an Indian Nation without permission, but I figured I would claim ignorance if anyone stopped me. Tohono O'odham means, literally, bean people. I didn't meet a single bean person on the reservation. It was a very eerie place -- an absolutely silent landscape with tall cactuses peering down from the side of the road. It was possibly the best place to find 'illegal' trash, and I must say that if I were an 'illegal', I would cross here too. But before long, a lone cop found me and approached with his hand on his gun. He was certainly a descendant of Billy the Kid, in one form or another. In his fifties, he had a sun burned face and beady little cowboy eyes. He probably ate steak for breakfast.

The cowboy cop told me one story after another about hunting down immigrants and smugglers. He told me about sixy mile car chases which ended with him shooting through his windshield, what sort of vehicles drug smugglers prefer (the Dodge 2500 pickup), and how he could shoot a man in the head from fifty feet. I almost asked him to demonstrate on one of the cactuses standing at the other side of the road. He told me that I was insane not to be carrying a weapon myself, as these parts were not safe to be unarmed and alone. 'You can get shanghaied real easy down here,' he told me. He also told me that I didn't have permission to be in the Indian Nation, and must leave. But he gave me his card and told me to give him a call if I ever wanted to come back.

Before I left, I asked him if he knew any good places to find trash outside the Indian Nation, and he gave me very specific directions to a place where he claimed I would fall over backwards with the amount of immigrant trash I would find. I dashed there at high speed in my rental vehicle and found the place he described. Nothing there -- not a single old shirt or bottle of rehydration fluid (they love rehydration fluid). Perhaps there once were a lot of traces of 'illegals' there, but no longer. The paths that 'illegals' take change constantly in order to avoid the Border Patrol. The only way to come across their trash is to notice the wrong sorts of thing, and to look in the least obvious places. But just when I'm about to give up, I'll come across a stash of treasure or find some object that describes this difficult journey better than anything else could.

NPR, The Bryant Park Project

Article: Nothing to Declare, Photos from the Mexican Border
By: Ian Chillag
Podcast
Link

Traveling along the Mexico border on a drive from San Diego, photographer Richard Mosse spotted a rucksack lying by the side of the road. Curiosity got the better of him, and he looked inside. He found clothes, jewelry and cards for learning English. description.

Mosse realized he was looking at the belongings of a woman crossing the border, likely dropped when she had to run. It was the beginning of his project in process, "Nothing to Declare," a series of images of artifacts of journeys across the border.

He's in Arizona today working on it, but you can find the photographs captured so far on his website.

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BLDG BLOG

Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures
February 11, 2008
Article: Air Disaster Simulations
Interview by: Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell Magazine and blogger behind BLDG BLOG
Link

Photographer Richard Mosse got in touch over the weekend with these photographs of air disaster simulations: fire crews racing to put out temporary fires, amidst fake airplane bodies on the runways of airports all over Europe and the United States.

"I spotted my first air disaster simulator on the tarmac at JFK," Mosse wrote. "You can see it yourself next time you fly into that airport. It's an intimidating black oblong structure situated dangerously close to one of the runways. Ever since, I have hunted for air trainers while taxi-ing across each new airport that I've had the chance to fly into."

When I asked him about the actual photographic process – setting himself up near burning, abstract airplanes in order to get the right shot – Mosse replied: "They are extremely difficult to photograph. First the water jets are turned on to douse the fuselage in water. This is in order to stop the metal warping under the intense heat of the flames. Then a pilot light comes on – and the spectacle begins."

"But before you've had a chance to cock your shutter and take the photo," Mosse continued, "it is all finished."

The firemen have put out the fire in seconds. That's their job, after all. They do this with decisive brevity and great courage, sometimes walking right into flames – but it doesn't make for an easy photograph. It's all a bit like the sexual act: the flames come up and men run in and spray everything with a high power water hose and then it's all over.

But that act entails artistry and technique...

And each airport is different: "The fire crew at each airport is always fiercely proud of their rig," Mosse writes.

One crew invited their family along and held a barbeque to watch the training unfold over the course of an evening. Another crew actually let me use their cherry picker bucket to get my camera into position. At one airport, I was even fully equipped to let me work as close as possible to the flames. During one shoot, a Royal Brunei jumbo hit a piece of debris upon take off and the entire crew were mobilized to battle stations. For security reasons, I hid in a small shed while they dealt with the emergency, which they resolved without incident. But that's why these structures are built: to keep the crew fire fit at all times, always willing to jump into the flames.

It's a kind of anthropological micro-culture of the air disaster simulation crew, eating barbecued chicken and running through flames.

Sometimes mannequins get involved, artificial humans needing to be rescued from situations of extreme peril. Like Ballardian stand-ins, they are scuffed, scraped, and partially blackened by oil and smoke, then surgically repaired with strips of duct tape.

Of course, this reminds me of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's work on law enforcement training architecture, where simulated townscapes play host to staged police raids, fake shoot-outs, and simulated hostage situations. There is even a Laser Village.

As the Center writes: "Whether they are made for police or fire departments, these training sites are stylized versions of ordinary places, with the extraordinary horrors of the anticipated future applied to them on a routine basis."

One location in particular, the Del Valle Training Center, comes complete with "industrial props (including a portion of an oil refinery), vehicle accident props (including propane-powered bus collisions and a collapsed building prop), concrete slab cutting props, shoring training props, confined space rescue props, and other urban search and rescue facilities."

Something tells me Richard Mosse would have a field day there.

In any case, I asked Mosse what the general idea behind this project was, and he explained that, in all his work, he's been trying to show "the ways in which we perceive and consume catastrophe."

The actual disaster is a moment of contingency and confusion. It's all over in milliseconds. It's hidden in a thick cloud of black smoke and you cannot even see it. Battles, ambushes, hijackings, air strikes, terrorism: it's the same with all of these, too. But the catastrophe lives on before the fact and after the fact, as this spectacle. That's why I wanted to photograph the air disaster simulators; they are the air disaster more than the thing itself. We have built in our airports these enormous, absurd, phallic structures with kerosene jets and water sprinklers. They are monuments to our own fear, made within the pared down, hyper-functional, green and black and grey symbolic order of militarized space.

Mosse has also photographed real plane crash sites:

As for the actual plane crashes, these are also difficult to photograph. You must be prepared to travel immediately in order to photograph one, and you don't know if you will even be able to get a photograph of it when you get there. For very good reasons, press photographers are always corralled into a pen at a great distance from the disaster. Most photographers take out their longest lens and zoom right in – but I don't have a zoom lens. I shoot with a wooden field camera, and so I am forced to shoot the disaster in its context, as a landscape photograph. The results end up looking like something approaching early war photography from the 19th century (Roger Fenton, Matthew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, etc.).

"I think it's important," Mosse concludes, "that we understand where catastrophe exists in our cultural imagination – where it actually is in reality – which is why I do what I do."

Be sure to check out the rest of Mosse's work on his website, including his photographs of Dubai.

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DAMn Magazine, Belgium

March-April 2007
Article: Ground Control
Section: Portfolio
Text and Images by: Richard Mosse
Link

Studying a map of Gaza does not reveal much. It's a small piece of land, a strip cut along the coast for less than 30 miles, and inland for a few more. Compared in size with the neighbouring Negev, and the adjacent Sinai Peninsula, Gaza is like the eye of a needle. There are only a few roads on the map. The map is probably obsolete and shows Israeli settlements where now there are none. Israeli roads, too, have been turned to rubble and the flyovers mined by the Israel Defence Force prior to evacuation. The small yellow inch of your map reveals absolutely nothing about Gaza. But in the southeast corner, butted up to the borders with Egypt and Israel, the mapmakers have printed the cartographer's symbol for an international airport. Gaza International Airport, it says.

Gaza – like Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia – is one of the fronts of a new global war in which the West seeks to influence a hardening of purpose among Islamic peoples. A civil war currently threatens in Gaza. Fatah is being propped up by US contributions and, it is alleged, by weapons shipments from Israel itself. A democratically elected Hamas party, meanwhile, has had its tax contributions suspended by the Israeli Knesset and its foreign aid cut by Western nations. Ismail Haniya, the president of Hamas, has had to gather funds in Iran and the Gulf states and smuggle them across the border through Egypt at the Rafah checkpoint. It’s likely that Iranian arms are finding their way into Gaza in a similar fashion. Where Gazans were once united in a common struggle against an Israeli occupation, they are now divided along party and family lines. In spite of calls from Mahmoud Abbas, head of Fatah, and from Haniya, Gaza is seeing an escalation of sporadic but deadly internecine fighting. At the time of my visit in early January this year, the IDF was refusing any entry to Gaza except to journalists. I managed to wangle a temporary press card from a friend, Dickon Mager, at Sky News in Jerusalem. Sky needed pictures of its new Israel correspondent Dominic Waghorn, so I spent a day taking pictures of him at work in the field in exchange for a safe way into Gaza to see the airport for myself.

In the morning, we visited the remains of the home of a Fatah leader, Mohammed Ghraib. On January 4th, Ghraib was conducting a live telephone interview with Palestine TV from his home in Gaza City. During the interview, Hamas mounted an assault on his house. The attack, Colonel Ghraib’s pleading for help, and his assassination with seven others could be heard broadcast on live television. It was clear that Hamas did not limit their assault to small weapons. The use of RPG launchers was evident in many of the rooms, whose walls were thick with fingers of black tar reaching in long drips from ceiling to floor.

After surveying the wreckage we visited the home of Sameh al-Madhoun, a colleague of Ghraib in the Fatah movement and a commander in the Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade. Over small cups of fabulously smooth Arabic coffee, Sameh told us that he was expecting to be assassinated by Hamas in much the same way as Colonel Ghraib. For this reason he was turning his home into a fortress. He and his brothers had piled the walls of their rooftop with sandbags and razor wire. A pair of RPG launchers leaned awkwardly in the corner of the sitting room, and there were several assault rifles about the place. A large cache of ammunition lay beneath Sameh’s bed; a host of cell phones and walkie-talkies were strapped to his body armour. There were dark creases below Sameh’s eyes from lack of sleep. He told us that he had already survived several attempts on his life, and stepped forward to be photographed with a martyr’s care for self-image which is unknown in the West. It involves cold realism, pride, fatalism, vanity, drunken sobriety, and a unique, almost mythic understanding of history.

Having finished my assignment for Sky, I was then free to make my own way to the airport. Though the distance from Gaza City to the airport is about 20 miles, the journey takes a good hour. When I finally arrived, the sun was beginning to thicken with the onset of the afternoon, and the light became beautiful. The airport itself was opened in November 1998 at a ceremony attended by Bill Clinton. It was fully operational until December 2001 when, during the Second Intifada, three Israeli tanks and an armoured bulldozer damaged the runway. But the main terminal building was left untouched. For almost five years, the airport’s staff continued to turn up for work in the morning in spite of the fact that the airport was no longer operational. There were no arrivals and no departures, but the check-in desk was still manned, and the baggage belts were run each day. It must have been a kind of a Marie Celeste airport. I see it as one of those peculiar situations which one comes across in these places. Reality borders the absurd, and you can’t quite work out if the whole thing is comedy or tragedy.

During last summer’s war with Lebanon, the IDF took the opportunity to finish the job off, bombing and vandalizing the terminal building. Before they left the airport their bulldozer scraped the initials IDF in Hebrew into the terminal building. It can only be read from the sky. Now, the airport is being stripped for materials by local looters. It is a ghostly place. As the sky darkened, the looters arrived for another shift. I could hear them at a distance, yelping and singing as they tore the wiring from electrical panels in the control room.

Sameh al-Madhoun was dragged through the streets and killed by a crowd of Hamas supporters on June 14th 2007. His grave at Beit Lahiya was defiled, probably by Hamas members, in August 2007. You can watch video footage of his death, taken from Hamas TV, here: http://video.news.sky.com/skynews/video/?&videoSourceID=1271513.

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Lápiz International Art Magazine

November 2006 Edition Nº 227
Article: Richard Mosse
Section: Reviews
By: Piedad Soláns
Translation: Laura F. Farhall

In Minima Moralia Theodor W. Adorno said: "The contradiction between what is made and what exists is the vital element of art and encompasses the law of its development; however, it is also its misery." Art cannot elude its "reason," and the more the artistic object approaches mass production, the more this issue arises. "Yet works of art," says Adorno, "try to silence it."

The beauty of Richard Mosse's photographs is enclosed in the core of their contradiction: they show horror, ruin, war. Yet what emerges from the camera after a technical and selective process is not what is real, but an attractive product, that is commercially and industrially perfect and arouses in the viewers the (morally masked) emotion of beauty. Romanticism was aware of this and contemporary art did not forget about it; Mario Perniola called it the "idiocy and splendour of modern art." However, Mosse does not seem to hide it, noting the failed impotence of representation when searching for symmetry with reality, similitude with the object. Like a reporter, journalist or member of an NGO, he tries to portray suffering, war conflicts, disasters caused by injustice, in a journey through cities destroyed by the war, in Bosnia, Ramallah, Beirut or Kosovo, or devastated by catastrophes, in Iran or Pakistan.

The result is images that fascinate and amaze the viewers with their mystery and beauty: an aesthetic product.

Mosse's first solo exhibition in Spain also includes two videos, Yani Intifada (2005) and Jew on a Ball (2006), which are structured as television interviews with youths from Palestine and Israel and, as a result, come up against the impossibility -that appears in the action of the man that constantly falls off the ball- of media language to stimulate the energy of affection, the difficulty of transmission and communication in a world dominated by images, although it is, in reality, subjected to the basic instances of love and death.

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El Mundo

6th of November 2006
Article: "En versión original: Fotografías y vídeos recogen testimonios alternativos al oficial"
By: ASUN CLAR / CARLOS JOVER
embed link http://www.elmundo-eldia.com/2006/11/06/cultura/1162767601.html

En versión original: Fotografías y vídeos recogen testimonios alternativos al oficial RICHARD MOSSE

ASUN CLAR / CARLOS JOVER

PALMA.- No sólo son las imágenes que Richard Mosse (Kilkenny, Irlanda, 1980) va seleccionando inquisitivamente en los viajes que realiza a enclaves especialmente seleccionados, sino también el testimonio que él mismo recoge de los protagonistas de estos lugares, los que componen de un mundo conjunto toda una obra con la que logra enfocar otras visiones sobre los acontecimientos que narra. Esta narración que está implícita en las fotografías mudas y en las imágenes de los vídeos es como una voz en off que rasga la pantalla en la que se está proyectando una película excesivamente mediatizada por la prensa, a la que asistimos como espectadores pasivos.

Son los escenarios heridos por las guerras, por los terremotos o por los enfrentamientos sociales y políticos, los que dejan marcado el rostro no sólo de los protagonistas, sino también del paisaje urbano, desmoronado tras ser sacudido por la violencia. No llega a ser una poética de la ruina, aunque el resultado estético de sus imágenes pueda mostrar aspectos plásticos atractivos, ya que los acontecimientos que las han provocado remiten a tragedias ya conocidas (aunque sea de pasada) a través de los medios de comunicación.

El monopolio de la información recibida, sobre todo de hechos muy distantes, impide que se contrasten. Los afectados no tienen voz y las imágenes son sólo parciales. El artista, al servicio sólo de sus objetivos, actúa dando otras voces y otras miradas distintas a las ya conocidas, tratando así de completar una realidad que es siempre múltiple.

El arte como denuncia frente a la manipulación de los medios al servicio del poder es uno de los temas recurrentes en el arte contemporáneo; no sólo se utilizan reveladoras imágenes manipuladas, sino que también se actúa como cronista. El fotoperiodismo elevó este registro a categoría artística, y es esta actitud la que ahora retoma, consciente desde el principio, Richard Mosse.

Este tipo de propuestas actualizan la labor del artista como testigo incómodo de la realidad. Los instrumentos han cambiado y ya no son los pinceles los que proponen retratos sarcásticos de la realeza o de las costumbres de sus convecinos, sino la fotografía y el vídeo los que dirigen la mirada crítica al entorno. Si antes se ironizaba sobre la sociedad a la que pertenecía el artista, en la que él mismo estaba inmerso, la reducción del mundo a aldea global permite ahora que dirija su mirada hacia ámbitos que aunque le quedan muy lejos, no le son en absoluto ajenos. Son las mismas localizaciones que merecen atención en las noticias, pero las versiones no son las mismas.

De este modo se convierte en reportero y acude él mismo a lugares en conflicto. Este activismo cercano al periodista gráfico le valió inicialmente la reprobación de los profesores de la prestigiosa Goldsmiths University, (en la que también se formó el controvertido colectivo de los Young British Artists), pero la selección en 2005 por Bloomberg New Contemporaries como uno de los mejores artistas emergentes, ha reconsiderado y respaldado esta mirada crítica y plural.

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Diari de Balears: L'ESPIRA

4th of November 2006 Article: "Richard Mosse, imatges de la impotència" By: Cristina Ros

No ens ha d'estranyar que la galeria La Caja Blanca demostri un interès per mostrar l'obra de Richard Mosse (Kilkenny, Irlanda, 1980). Les fotografíes i vídeos que s'hi exhibeixen no poden deixar ningú indiferent, tenen una notable qualitat i arriben plens de contingut i d'intencionalitat, però, a més, els germans Eva i Amir Shakouri Torreadrado, directors d'aquest espai del carrer Verí, de Palma, i alhora comissaris de l'exposició del joveníssim artista irlandès, són d'origen iranià, i per forçahan d'haver sentit de prop els grans conflictes i crisis que, dia sí i dia també, sacsegen l'Orient Mitjà, que són els que predominen a les imatges d'aquesta exposició.

Amb la perspicàcia i el sentit de la ubiqüitat d'un reporter, i amb la mirada transcendent de l'artista, Richard Mosse no només se situa davant els escenaris de grans drames humanitaris (Iran, Bòsnia, Sèrbia, Líban i fins i tot Dubai) sinó que hi penetra per retornar-nos unes imatges metafóriques i poètiques alhora, en les quals sobretot hi són presents la denúncia i les ironies del destí. Especialment significativa en aquest sentit és la fotografía que va realitzar el juny del 2002 a la seu del diari bosnià Oslobodenje, una capçalera la traducció de la qual és Llibertad. L'edifici del diari dit Llibertat apareix, paradoxalment, destruït per un bombardeig i, per rematar la paradoxa, només es manté dreta la seva torre, un símbol clarament fál·lic. Igualment metafórica és la fotografía de la ciutat iraniana de Bam, patrimoni de la humanitat amb més de 2.000 anys d'història, del tot arrasada per un terratrèmol que la va triar com a centre en el mes de desembre de 2003.

Una església ortodoxa de Kosovo, també bombardejada, es mostra en una vista des de l'exterior i una altra des de l'interior para crear una metàfora de la violació dels drets humans.

Finalment, una sèrie de fotografies de Dubai deixen al descobert l'enlluernament de la seva riquesa, mentre els operaris que la construeixen viuen en unes condicions infrahumanes i d'absoluta falta de llibertad. En tot cas, a més de la significació de cadascuna d'aquestes fotografíes, s'ha de destacar la seva qualitat, tant en la imatge com en la reproducció i el muntatge sobre alumini o sobre vidre.

No menys interessants resulten els dos vídeos que Richard Mosse presenta a La Caja Blanca. Fets amb menys cura per l'estètica i amb més intenció de reportatge, Ya'ni Intifada recull un seguit d'entrevistes a joves de la universitat Bir Zeit de Ramallah (la zona ocupada), als quals se'ls demana el significat de la paraula Intifada, i cadascun en dóna una resposta diferent i gairebé sempre del tot deslligada amb la significació de conflicte que té per als occidentals. D'altra banda, Jew on a Ball (Jueu damunt una pilota) fa referència a la recent guerra del Líban: mentre una sèrie de dones parlen del significat de la paraula amor, un seguit d'homes jueus, nus, tracten de mantenir un equilibri, impossible, damunt una esfera.

Amb tot, metàfores de la impossibilitat de la comunicació i de la impotència de l'artista per transmetre el sofriment humà, en les obres d'un Richard Mosse que no deixa lloc per a la indiferència.

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Marmalade Magazine

October 2006, 11th Edition Article: "Appetite for Destruction: The best of new talented" By: Ossian Ward Interview with Richard Mosse. Link

Feast your eyes on bombed out monuments to war and decaying legacies of natural disasters.

"It all began in the blistering Balkan sunshine at age 19," says artist and photographer Richard Mosse. "A friend and I decided to take a detour up to Zagreb through Bosnia rather than retrace our steps up the coast. We discovered the warmth, gregariousness and hilarity of the Bosnian people, living in a battle-scarred landscape that was very exciting as well as sad to travel through." This double take, this simultaneous attraction and repulsion that Mosse encounters on his numerous trips to war-torn nations also informs his haunting pictures.

His large-format landscapes of a bullet-punctured cinema in Beirut or the half-destroyed headquarters of a Bosnian national newspaper pull and push our gaze in equal measures, drawing us in with their glorious detail and sumptuous colour, yet horrifying our sensibilities with the human implications of such wanton destruction of architecture and infrastructure. Earthquake damage to mosques in Pakistan and ancient cities in Iran, or the image of a Serbian church reduced to rubble in Kosovo, also remind us that while religion may not be able to solve the ills of the earth, it has provided us with some of our greatest buildings and monuments and that they all deserve saving, regardless of the faith they serve.

Mosse has also produced surprising portraits, such as those of Lebanese citizens going about their everyday business in Drive Beirut, 2004, or of inhabitants of Ramallah wearing the traditional Palestinian headscarf as a way of keeping sand out of their faces and not to denote allegiance to any terrorist cause, in Dust, 2005. This is a double take of a different, order one that shakes our preconceived world view and replicates it in a new, perhaps more compassionate or lighter reading of different cultures. "What attracts me most, and keeps me coming back for more, is an open-ended understanding of life that I see in people who have been through terrible suffering."

Unlike a documentary photographer or a photojournalist, Mosse works slowly and methodically, lugging around an enormous studio camera and tripod, rather than shooting thousands of images on digital ("Cyan is definitely not my favourite colour", he quips). "There is a lot of research, a lot of waiting and a lot of feeling rather useless", he says of the build-up to a trip or to a new series of pictures, "but then the most dynamic aspect of my work comes from intuition and the blind faith in following my instincts and sticking to my guns".

Mosse's peripatetic life has again led him to leave behind his hometown, his friends and the delights of the London underground for the even brighter lights and bigger city of New York. Having landed one of only eight places on the two-year MFA in photography at Yale School of Art, which boasts big name tutors such as Phillip-Lorca DiCorcia, Paul Graham and Gregory Crewdson, Mosse has to turn his lens towards America for the first time. "It seems difficult to me at this stage, like I am a fish out of water, but there's so much to think about in this vast, peculiar country of catastrophic politics and fear."

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Ultima Hora

31st of October 2006 Article: "Richard Mosse" By: Cristina Ros

El interés de las obras de Richard Mosse (Kilkenny, Irlanda 1980) transciende en mucho la imagen que se reproduce en ellas. Desde hace semanas y hasta finales de noviembre, una selección de impactantes fotografías y dos vídeos ocupan el espacio semisubterráneo de la galería La Caja Blanca, en la calle Verí de Palma. Desde los escenarios de los grandes conflictos y catástrofes humanitarias, el jovencísimo Richard Mosse no se queda en la visión de un reportero.

Sus fotos y vídeos están llenos de metáforas y de contenido, a sabiendas de la imposibilidad de transmitir, en toda su crudeza, la realidad del sufrimiento humano a través de los medios de comunicación. Para ello, sus fotografías ofrecen muchas y diferentes lecturas, demuestran una notable preocupación estética, pero sobre todo denotan la voluntad de brindar una mirada muy personal sobre los acontecimientos y, a través de la contemplación de unos paisajes azotados por la tragedia, sin apenas rastro del ser humano, provocar una reacción del espectador. La ciudad de Bam, en Irán, asolada por un terremoto a finales de 2003, la destruida sede del diario bosnio <<Oslobodenje>> (que significa <<libertad>>, qué paradoja), una iglesia ortodoxa serbia en Kosovo igualmente bombardeada, Dubai como imagen de grandes contrastes entre la exuberante riqueza y las inhumanas condiciones en que viven quienes contribuyen a construirla, son los lugares en los que ha fijado Mosse el objetivo. No menos interesantes son los dos vídeos que se muestran, especialmente <<Jew on a Ball>>, en el que el artista trata de demostrar que el equilibrio sobre la esfera es imposible. La exposición, muy recomendable.

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Art Info

29th of September 2006
Article: "Richard Mosse at Spain's La Caja Blanca"
News & Features
Link

PALMA DE MALLORCA, Spain--La Caja Blanca is presenting a solo exhibition by Irish photographer and video artist Richard Mosse through Nov.25.

In a time when war-torn cities and landscapes devastated by nature fill the newspapers and television programs we consume, this young artist questions the validity of the images distributed by the media industry as a means of communicating the reality of human suffering.

Mosse's photographs show devastated landscapes and schoolrooms crumbling onto the classroom desks. What strikes the viewer is not the human suffering that took place, but an overwhelming sense of stillness, serenity and stunning beauty.

The videos go even further, with Yani Intifada (2005) and Jew on a Ball (2006) depicting interviews with the inhabitants of these locations.

Mosse's photographs and video pieces have been taken in locations such as Bosnia, Ramallah, Beirut, Kosovo, Iran and Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province.

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Iberarte

20th of September 2006 Article: "Richard Mosse en La caja Blanca-Mallorca" By: Iberarte Editors

Link

Fotografía

¿Puede el arte contemporáneo ejercer de contrapeso frente a la información sesgada que nos ofrecen los medios de comunicación?

La Caja Blanca es un espacio dedicado a la promoción de artistas contemporáneos emergentes de distintas culturas y nacionalidades, en Mallorca y a nivel internacional.

Este primer año (2006), nuestra programación constará de cinco exposiciones individuales que darán a conocer una selección de jóvenes artistas excepcionales que viven a caballo entre distintas culturas. La primera exposición estará a cargo de Richard Mosse [1980, County Kilkenny, República de Irlanda] El evento coincidirá con la Nit de l'Art, la celebración que marca el inicio oficial de la temporada de arte en Palma de Mallorca.

En el 2005, fue seleccionado por Bloomberg New Contemporaries, un certamen donde se seleccionan cada año a los artistas más talentosos con menos de 30 años a nivel internacional. Richard Mosse es un artista que trabaja fundamentalmente con la fotografía y el vídeo.

Ha hecho una tesis sobre fotografía documental en Yugoslavia para el London Consortium (Tate, ICA, Architectural Association, Birkbeck). Postgraduado en Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Londres (Goldsmith's University of London).

En 2005 fue seleccionado por Bloomberg New Contemporaries, un certamen donde se selecciona cada año a los artistas emergentes más talentosos con menos de 30 años a nivel internacional. Actualmente estudia en Yale School of Art llevando a cabo uno de los Master más prestigiosos en fotografía de EE.UU..

Su último vídeo titulado "Ya'ni Intifada" ganó el premio "Perspectiva" como mejor obra (Ormeau Baths Gallery).

Richard Mosse
COMISARIOS: Amir y Eva Shakouri Torreadrado
INAUGURA: Jueves 21 de septiembre 2006 a partir de 19:00h a 22:30
Dirección: La Caja Blanca, Calle Verí 9, Palma de Mallorca 07001. España
Para reservar entrevistas, obtener imágenes o más información, no duden en ponerse en contacto con los directores.

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Art Review, October 2005

Article: Emerging Photographers, A firm hold on the future
by Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
Link

A search for heritage and understanding has been the pretext for Richard Mosse's forays into war-torn landscapes. The result is a growing collection of architectural wounds from conflict-ravaged sites, which displays the unabashed influence of the Becher's typological aesthetic, but also an independent, powerful clarity. Mosse's stunningly beautiful images of awful catastrophes and crumbling architecture are seductive and alluring as art-objects, and troubling at the same time, at the crossroads between aesthetic and ethical responsibility. The young Irish photographer, a founding member of the innovative Photodebut collective, will be showing Ya'ni Intifada, his recent video work from the Palestinian territories, at Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast, until 15 October. He is this year's joint winner of the gallery's open submission Perspective prize, and his 'Untitled' series, travelling as part of Bloomberg new Contemporaries 2005, is at LOT in Bristol (until 16 October) and at the Barbican in London (16 Nov-8Jan 2006). richardmosse.com, photodebut.org, newcontemporaries.org.uk

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SeeSaw Magazine, Winter 2004

The Balkans: Architecture Wounded

Bosnia and Kosovo, 2002-2004

by Richard Mosse

Link

In 2001, I took a cheap flight to Croatia with a friend. Raddled with sun and crusty with sea air from visiting the islands, we decided to take a quick detour back to Zagreb through Bosnia, rather than retrace our steps up the golden coast of the Adriatic.

I cannot explain the difficult feelings on arriving into Sarajevo in the early morning. I could still remember the names of the towns on the news during the Balkan wars in my teenage years, but never understood the conflict. And here it all was, written out for us in sublime architecture, and in the grief and living of a people.

That year, I spent only five days in Bosnia, and most of that on a sweltering bus. But I have returned as often as I am allowed, and have fallen in love with the people and their heritage. And I refer not only to Bosnians (though they are the most gregarious), but also to the Albanians, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians and Gypsies, wherever they find themselves in the parts of these lands.

RICHARD MOSSE is from County Kilkenny, Ireland, and lives in London. After receiving a BA in English Literature from King's College, he moved to Berlin, using it as a base to explore the continent with a camera. In 2002, Mosse was highly commended for his Bosnian photographs by the Observer Hodge Award. He continued to pursue the project, leading to a Masters degree at the London Consortium in 2003. He is currently pursuing a postgraduate degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, and most recently, became a member of the photographic collective, Photodebut.

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Static Pamphlet

Seminal

Article: The Little Business of Biennials, Dorit Margreiter, Alexandre Promio and Liverpool

By: Richard Mosse, January 6th, 2004

Link

Dorit Margreiter employs the footage and confessions of Lumière camera operator Alexandre Promio in her work Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma, made specially for the International 04 at last year’s Liverpool Biennial.

In an account from 1925, translated and narrated by Kaucilya Brooke for the installation, Promio is proud to remind us that he was the first in history to move the camera. Promio is famous for shooting footage in 1896 from a travelling gondola on the grand canal in Venice.

A reference to Venice within the framework of the International 04 is not without significance. Venice hosts the biennale par excellence, against which art biennials around the world are measured. And today’s global biennial culture is not unlike the world’s earliest cinema circuit, within which Promio operated.

Promio’s biographer, Rittaud-Hutinet describes him as ‘une sorte de dandy globe-trotter’ staying at the very finest hotels and mixing with high society attracted by the new technology. Promio and other Lumière operators demonstrated the Cinématographe in 31 present day countries—from Mexico to Australia via India and Indo-China—within a space of just two or three years.1 Like today’s contemporary artist on the biennial circuit, Promio’s life was spent moving on, from city to city.

Discussing the Liverpool Biennial in ‘Location Location’ (Art Monthly 281), Claire Doherty tracks a fear that ‘biennials operate merely as stopovers on the international circuit for the frequent-flyer tribe of artists and art cognoscenti and that they have little or no lasting impact on the inhabitants or on the cultural life of their host cities.’

This very formula seems to have been the guiding principle behind the International 04. Forty eight international artists—artists who were specifically not from Britain—were invited to Liverpool to ‘address and empower place as having value’. Deliberation on the artists’ internationality seems to emphasise the dilemma, as if globe-trotting were somehow the key to locating Liverpool. Alexandre Promio was an itinerant cameraman, but one whose nomadism brought a new sense of locality to every stage of his endless journey. Hot on the heels of the very first presentation of the Cinématographe in Lyon in June 1895, operators from the Lumière firm toured the world with cameras that doubled as projectors in order to demonstrate the marvels of the moving image. To attract local punters, operators filmed streets and landmarks particular to each town or city for their demonstration. The Swedish newspaper Stockholms-tidningen reported on Promio’s footage exhibited at The Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, The Cinématographe in The Old Town has succeeded to get some pure Swedish pictures. Here we can see the streaming torrents in the waterfall of Avesta in Dalarna, a tennis game on grass in Saltsjöbaden (where the players are so touched by the significance of the moment that they can hardly play at all)...

So excited were patrons by the prospect of being filmed that the very sight of the camera in public gave the project a certain momentum. Film was expensive and only a few minutes were necessary yet Promio confesses, I could not take a step in the town without being followed by a crowd desiring to take part in a scene so that they might then see themselves on screen. How many times have I filmed without film in the camera, people who came and placed themselves less than two meters from it.2

On a certain level, the effect Promio’s camera had was not unlike that of early site specific art. Art’s site-specificity came to attention in the early 1960s when Minimalist artists pared down surface and form in order to highlight the work’s materiality as part of a strategy to reveal the hidden authority of the gallery space. The viewer in effect is made conscious of her own perception, becoming aware of the art object in its context and the situation in which it is viewed. This occurs by displacing the viewer’s attention from the art object. Nick Kaye explains in Site Specific Art that

The minimalist object emphasises a transitive definition of site, forcing a self-conscious perception in which the viewer confronts her own effort ‘to locate, to place’ the work and so her own acting out of the gallery’s function as the place for viewing.’ 3

Both Promio and Minimalism engage the viewer in a transitive encounter with their own location, one that draws the subject back upon the way they see, the way they see themselves within their context.

Transitive is perhaps a useful description of the phenomenon as it contains the word transit: the Cinématographe’s transitory route around the world, and the updated form of today’s site specific art which, according to Miwon Kwon is ‘dispersed across much broader cultural, social, and discursive fields, and organized intertextually through the nomadic movement of the artist—operating more like an itinerary than a map.’ 4

In his theory of Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud involves the cinema theorist Serge Daney, to whom ‘all form is a face looking at us.’ Rather like Promio attracting crowds on the street before an empty camera,

The work tries to catch my gaze, the way the new-born child “asks for” its mother’s gaze... Todorov has shown how the essence of sociability is the need for acknowledgement, much more than competition and violence. When an artist shows us something, he uses a transitive ethic which places his work between the “look-at-me” and the “look-at-that”. Daney’s most recent writings lament the end of this “Show/See” pairing, which represented the essence of a democracy of the image in favour of another pairing, this one TV-related and authoritarian, “Promote/receive”... 5

Promio was early cinema’s travelling salesman. His emergence in Margreiter’s installation asks us how today’s biennial circuit might be compared with the market economics of the world’s first film industry. It could be argued that both court notions of ‘the community as a coherent and unified social formation—equally valorized by neoconservatives and the liberal left—which often serves exclusionary and authoritarian purposes in the very name of the opposite.’ 6

Lumière’s first ever cinematographic presentation was precisely that. Sortie de l’usine Lumière a Lyon depicted workers leaving the Lumière factory—an educational document, but one used to promote and market the Lumière product. This became the strategy of early cinema. Promio and other operators shot local scenes in each town and presented them, ostensibly for civic and educational purposes, in order to expand an emerging market. Margreiter reverses the formula in her installation, re-presenting early cinema in the town of Liverpool within what Kwon calls the idea of community as a necessarily unstable and “inoperative” spectre in order to think beyond formulaic prescriptions of community, to open onto an altogether different model of collectivity and belonging. 7

Liverpool is known among film makers as ‘the world in one place.’ One of two screens in Margreiter’s installation features static shots of street scenes and landmarks in a style reminiscent of Lumière footage. But the sites Margreiter has chosen from the streets of Liverpool are those that have stood in for other streets in films about other towns. Moscow, Paris, New York, Rome, Chicago, Vienna. Liverpool has been each of these and other cities.

The other screen in Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma shows documentary footage of Canning Street. This Liverpool street is often used for its Georgian terraces to represent Dublin in film and television footage. Margreiter and 25 volunteers reenacted the process of dressing the street as one in Dublin in the year 1896. Traces of the twentieth century are hidden, railings and lamps repainted, and twenty tonnes of soil are barrowed, shovelled and raked across the surface of the road. Finally, a coach and horses arrive to break in the freshly laid turf road, driving up the roadway and returning to leave an authentic trail of hoof prints and wheel marks in its wake.

It was in 1896 that Promio visited Liverpool on his way to demonstrate the Cinématographe in Dublin. Promio may never have filmed Liverpool had it not fallen en route. But Liverpool is important for being the gateway to other places, and in a curious reversal no footage from Promio’s Dublin visit remains. Layers of displacement are employed in order to more fully locate the subject.

The coach and horses’ delimination upon the turf seals the work’s accumulated sense of real time displaced by cinematic time and urban history, and real space located elsewhere – tracks belonging to a wheel of infinite origins and destinations. Margreiter’s installation represents a city that is not easily located, perhaps cannot be located, or must be produced. It exists in the interstices, in the webs of its own history, and the histories of other cities. Like cinema, we look sideways at other places, projected upon a blank screen in a darkened room somewhere else.

Cinema is pertinent here. Bourriaud identifies this technology’s invention as a watershed in the history of art, responsible for the art object’s shift to something more complex, enriched by a century of photographic images, then cinematography (introduction of the sequence shot as a new dynamic unity), enabling us to recognise as a “world” a collection of disparate elements (installation, for instance) that no unifying matter, no bronze, links. 8

Yet it is the same technology that would eventually lead to television, the culture of “Promote/receive” that Bourriaud pits as art’s antithesis, responsible for what Kwon describes as the concomitant breakdown of traditional temporal-spatial experiences and the accompanying homogenization of places and erasure of cultural differences... [t]he intensifying conditions of spatial indifferentiation and departicularization—that is, the increasing instances of locational unspecificity” 9

Even the capital of Scouse is not without its Starbucks. Indeed, David Briers notes in his review of the Liverpool Biennial’s Independents (Art Monthly, 281) that ‘there is a sad tinge to visiting the town centre now, because it is hurtling inexorably towards the homogenized outcomes of profit-driven regeneration, and will soon be tidied up and unaffordable.’

It’s no secret that the Liverpool Biennial has had an enormous effect on the wealth of the town. It is responsible for a profitable industry of art tourism which is fast regenerating the city centre, bringing with it a tide of rising house prices and Caffe Nero loyalty card holders.

So it is not a surprise that the world’s departicularization–inaugurated by the Cinématographe—has reached its logical conclusion in today’s nomadic artist, such as those imported for Liverpool’s International 04. Yet their brief was to ‘address and empower place as having value’, to locate Liverpool and brand it as a city with a difference.

It is unclear whether even the most heterogeneous art community is eventually infected by homogeneity, or whether it is only ever the disguise of capitalism’s homogeneous encroachment. According to Kevin Robins, As cities have become ever more equivalent and urban identities increasingly ‘thin,’ ... it has become necessary to employ advertising and marketing agencies to manufacture such distinctions. It is a question of distinction in a world beyond difference.

The key word here is equivalent. Margreiter manages the impossible. She produces work that problematizes any attempt to locate Liverpool by examining the city’s production of place and addressing the artist’s role in that production through the mirror reference formed by Promio. This is achieved by the careful treatment of the city’s equivalence and its trendy twin, its desire for difference. This is, Kwon suggests, the task of today’s site specific artist: addressing the uneven conditions of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalencies via one thing after another. 10

A transitive ethic forces us to engage one site with another and to examine what occurs between the two. What marks next from after is the same as what marks tourist from nomad, and biennial from artist.

1 Lumiere film production virtually dried up in 1898 following challenges to its monopoly and the break up of the firm’s Lyon-centred concessionary system which Promio and others promoted across the globe.

2 Coissac, Guillaume-Michel: Histoire du Cinematographe, Editions de Cineopse, 1925, p.200

3 Kaye, Nick: Site Specific Art, Routledge, 2000, p.2

4 Kwon, Miwon: One Place After Another, the MIT Press, 2002, p.3

5 Bourriaud, Nicolas: Relational Aesthetics, Les presses du réel, 2002, pp.23-24

6 Kwon, chapter five

7 Kwon, p.7

8 Bourriaud, p.20

9 Kwon, p.8

10 Kwon, chapter six

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Take My Hand Alight

Take My Hand Alight, edited by Hannah Barry, James Lindon, Thomas Mansell and Helen Slater. Published by Aitchess Press in collaboration with Tool Limited, London, 2003, ISBN 0-9543553-0-9

A catalogue to accompany Alight Here, exhibition at Aldwych Underground Station, March 2003

Article: My Medicine is Light

By: Richard Mosse

There is an unusual structure in the garden of my parents’ house, at home in Ireland. It was erected under the guidance of the artist James Turrell. The piece is called Air Mass. It is, for all the world, an empty box of a building with a square hole in the roof, and benches around the inside perimeter of the walls. The interiors are painted a pristine white. There is nothing of interest for the eye to rest on except the square of sky above you.

The sculpture confounds many visitors to the garden. There is an honest, salt of the earth type fellow named Pat who mows the lawn and rakes the paths. Pat doesn’t call the piece by its real name. It is, to him, the ‘giraffe-shed’, for what other purpose can it serve, other than as a home for giraffes? They could stretch their necks through the hole in the roof.

It is only since taking Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement in hand that I’ve started to think about how Turrell’s sculpture operates. Pat is right – the open roofed shed has no purpose, especially in rainy Ireland. But it is a shed, and so seems to need one. Pat’s practical minded imputation has hit on a possible function, absurdly involving giraffes. But there are no giraffes in Ireland, except in the zoo. Kilfane garden is not a zoo. It is, in parts, an art park.

Pat is perhaps responding to what Kant has termed the purposive quality of the beautiful. Air Mass is a work of art that possesses the quality of purposiveness while lacking any practical purpose, at least as long as it isn’t situated in the plains of Africa.

Turrell’s structure has helped me unpack some of Kant’s dreary theory in some helpful ways, as we can begin to see above. But the piece is by no means a conventional work of art. It is perhaps more helpful in the ways in which it problematizes Kant’s assumptions about the art object. The Air Mass structure has the aspect of purposiveness. Does this mean that it is an object of beauty?

Before we can ask that, we must ask whether it can even be said to constitute the object of our perception? The walls are not the object. Turrell himself has said that “Extreme attention must be paid to making perfect surfaces, so you don’t notice them.” Sat inside the structure, your gaze falls on what is outside – on the sky. But this is no ordinary sky.

I’ve found it best viewed at twilight, when the sky is not overcast. The walls and roof are evenly lit by strip lights hidden in a rim at the top of the benches. The field of light inside the structure limits the penetration of vision to the evening sky, outside. Yet there is nowhere else for the eye to fall. The square hole becomes thick. It is filled with a deep opacity. The empty space between the outside and the inside becomes corporeal, taking on the aspect of an object itself. But turn off the interior lights and, bang, the space is empty again.

There is an object! We just saw it. This is not a clever deconstruction of the objecthood of art. It is a positive construction of something there before our eyes. But what? It wasn’t the structure. Nor was it the night sky. Turrell explains,

How the light enters the space, and how the structure is formed to allow that, creates the work. The work is about your seeing. It is responsive to the viewer. As you move within the space or as you decide to see it, one way or another, its reality can change. The approach to it is very important. It’s possible for you to make the reality of your experience of the piece become the determinant of its existence.

The work of art is not up there in the ceiling. “The work is about your seeing.” So I’m wrong. There never was an object. There is only a subject. Me, the viewer sitting in an empty room, engaged in a perceptual experience of the presence of light in space.

“This is art without objects,” Daniel Birmbaum says. “It is not about what is before, but rather what is behind our eyes – about the preconditions of seeing and the limits of perceptions.” Indeed, Turrell’s first degree at Pomona College, California was in perceptual psychology. He understands the senses the way a good garage mechanic understands what goes on beneath the bonnet. And at the most immediate level, Turrell’s art deals in pure sensory phenomena. The thickening of empty space in Air Mass – a kind of reification of the void – this is a purely sensory phenomenon. Our eyes are hard-wired to interpret light as colour in certain ways that are defined by context which, in three dimensions, exists as space.

There are even better examples of how Turrell manipulates the circuitry of our eyes. I can remember visiting, as a child, another of Turrell’s sculptures. This one was exhibited in the town of Halifax as part of the Artranspennine festival in the north of England. Gasworks is a large grey spherical tank on legs, about twelve foot in diameter.

People were queuing to see what was inside. Each, in his turn, was asked to take off his shoes, and lie on his back on a tray. Two assistant boffins in white coats – one bald – pushed the prostrate punter on rollers into the sphere, and shut him in. I was terrified of the whole undertaking – it looked like a desperate mix of Clockwork Orange and War of the Worlds. But to this day I’m kicking myself for having declined the experience. Maybe I shall have the chance sometime in the future to be “immersed in an isolated situation which may induce dream-like or hallucinatory experiences of perception.”

My brother, who was always the braver sibling, reassured me at the time that there was nothing to see. Indeed, the interior is perfectly smooth – there is nothing upon which the eye may settle. Not an edge or a corner or even a shadow. The eye floats free without reference, and is subject to cycles of coloured light that merge into each other, punctuated at intervals by shots of powerful strobe.

Perhaps the intense white light of the strobe serves to clean the palette, as it were. Turrell refers to sensory pre-loading. He points out that

the senses have a short-term memory. They don’t clear immediately. We generally ignore the effects of afterimage, etc. However it is possible to make situations where this is virtually impossible.

The cycles of colour that I was able to see through a crack in the door of the tank – these were not the same colours that my brother was experiencing, dereferenced and isolated inside. Where I saw green followed by blue, he saw green married with blue – perhaps he saw brown. I will never know.

Nor will I know whether the strobe did actually clean the palette. I only remember an ominous sign at the foot of the tank warning epileptics of the dangers of strobe light.

We are dealing with more than just eyesight here. We are dealing with neurology. And light affects the entire body on a somatic level. I learned this the hard way last autumn. The shortening of daylight hours toward winter, and the lack of light under overcast London skies – autumn was getting me down. Thankfully, western medicine has given it a name: Seasonal Affective Disorder. I have a disease. My medicine is light. I’ve bought a box with bulbs that sits on my desk. I switch it on for breakfast. It whacks out the power of 10,000 candles and fills the room with light like a door to heaven.

Turrell had made a miniature version of Gasworks, called Alien Exam, that accommodates only the viewer’s head. Gasworks is the proper realization, however, since the entire body is immersed. “Light-sensitive areas of the skin all over the body are activated, resulting in a heightened perception of colour and light intensity.” “I like to work with [light] so that you feel it physically,” Turrell admits. “I like the quality of feeling that is felt not only with the eyes.”

We are dealing with feeling. Early in the third Critique, Kant rules feeling out of the aesthetic equation. “We shall call that which must always remain purely subjective, and is absolutely incapable of forming a representation of an object, by the familiar name of feeling.” Indeed, the subject dereferenced inside a piece of Turrell’s art is necessarily “purely subjective” since there is no object, other than what is born of the subject’s experience – e.g. the hallucination for which Gasworks is famous. My brother said he saw stars. He wanted another go, so that he might see them again. The stars were not a feeling – they were a phenomenon. But my brother was left with a feeling of gratification.

As a child, the sum of my brother’s experience of Gasworks was an agreeable feeling that is the product of subjective sensation. Kant reminds us that “the beautiful and the sublime agree… in not presupposing… a judgement of sense… but one of reflection.” It’s doubtful that this would have posed a problem to my brother at the time. As a child, he would have been unlikely to have wanted to draw an aesthetic judgement. But if he experiences Gasworks again as an adult, he may well want to call his experience either beautiful or sublime. This is in spite of the fact that the experience is born purely of subjective sensation and, as he assured me as a child, “there is nothing to see,” i.e. there is no object in Kant’s sense of “the representation of a thing (through sense as a receptivity pertaining to the faculty of knowledge).”

Kant would have had trouble making an aesthetic judgement of Gasworks because it lacks objectivity. However, we might be able to persuade him to give us the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Air Mass. Turrell says

I am really interested in the qualities of one space sensing another. It is like looking at someone looking. Objectivity is gained by being once removed. As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to “see yourself see.”

What occurs in Air Mass is not quite the same as the instant shocks to our sensations that we experience in Gasworks – what we might call sensory short-circuiting. Air Mass operates at an altogether slower pace. Turrell recommends spending at least an hour inside to fully appreciate what the sculpture does. And what gradually makes itself evident is the quality of “one space sensing another.” That is the thickening which I related earlier. The sky appears to come down to greet the space within the structure – covering the hole in the roof like a lid, or “a glassy film stretched across the opening.” “This seeing,” Turrell continues, “this plumbing, imbues space with consciousness. By how you decide to see it and where you are in relation to it, you create its reality.”

So there really is no object for Kant inside Air Mass. Or at least not until you come along and fill it with one by looking. Once more – “It’s possible for you to make the reality of your experience of the piece become the determinant of its existence.” Turrell is no artist. He merely constructs spatial situations within which the viewer is allowed to be the artist. Or perhaps Turrell might be permitted to call himself a non-vicarious artist – which he does. And he is, insofar as what we see is not a representation of his reality (as experienced by the artist). Instead of showing us an interpretation of the artist’s reality (a re-presentation), Air Mass presents the viewer with his own reality. Air Mass is a kind of Plato’s cave. Its object is our very subjectivity.

So we have our object after all. Let’s run with it before someone turns off the lights. Next thing on Kant’s list is aesthetic judgement. “That’s cool,” says my brother. “Gimme another go.” He is making what Kant calls a judgment of sense. Old Kant would have had reservations. He prefers disinterested judgements, unclouded by childish appetites. But he might have warmed to Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.

Count Panza is one of Turrell’s first collectors. Unlike my brother, the count is an art coinnoisseur of “genuine, uncorrupted, sincere taste,” if ever there was one. He states coolly, “Identity of love, truth and beauty is the final statement of Turrell’s art.” He has made a judgement of aesthetic reflection. This is in spite of the fact that, as he observes elsewhere, “There was no object, nothing but a relationship to the sky.” Is this judgement compatible with Kant’s aesthetics?

Let’s take the Count judgement by judgement: love, truth and beauty. The first of the three seems fairly unusual. Perhaps the Count means love in a higher sense – a divine love, or that of mother nature – for that’s what we’re examining: natural, physical phenomena. But where is the divine in all of this?

Like myself, Turrell comes from a Quaker family. He has collaborated with my pa, Nicholas, on a set of ceramic crockery called Lapsed Quaker Ware. I remember him joking about a habit peculiar to devout Quakers. Some of them insist on calling each other “friend.” Turrell can recall a fight between Quaker elders from his childhood in Arizona. One shouted at the other, “Fuck thee, friend!”

Despite the odd misgiving, I believe Turrell retains a deep respect for many aspects of the Quaker faith. Quakers worship in silent reflection. Meeting for worship involves the community sat concentrically, usually rectilinearly (as in Air Mass), in a simple place – a humble room – in silence. There are no songs or words or chanting, like other religions. Only silence. It is an atmosphere of spiritual reflection, just as Air Mass promotes an atmosphere of perceptual reflection. The two are not mutually exclusive. This is a point on which Kant would be bound to agree. After all, he wrote the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement so as to show, as Lyotard explains, that

the analytic of taste restores to judgment a universality, a finality, and a necessity—all of which are, indeed, subjective—merely by evincing its status as reflective judgement. This status is then applied to teleological judgement in order, precisely, to legitimate its use. In this way, the validation of subjective pleasure serves to introduce a validation of natural teleology.

The desire to show that things are ordered according to a final purpose – by God – underwrites Kant’s aesthetic philosophy.

There are no Quaker vicars, priests or pastors. Their worship is unmediated. Perhaps this has informed Turrell’s non-vicarious art. In the same way that Quakers wish to communicate with the divine spirit directly, a viewer of Turrell’s art is not confronted with a representation of the artist’s reality, but is allowed to communicate directly with his own reality non-vicariously. The foundation of that reality is made evident. It is art unmediated by illusion. Turrell makes the remark that “People have talked about illusion in my work, but I don’t feel it is an illusion because what you see alludes to what in fact it really is – a space where the light is markedly different.” Both Quakerism and Turrell’s art pursue a truth (on the one hand faith, on the other perception) that comes from within. This may be the truth to which the Count refers.

Count Panza describes something “ready to come out of a frame… something beautiful was nearby and real.” The thickening of the sky seen through the roof of Air Mass seems to reduce it to a pure field of colour. The Count’s observation seems to track Kant’s rule that “all simple colours are regarded as beautiful so far as pure.”

Kant draws a line between beauty and purity. A pure colour is simple. It can be understood in terms of what it is not: “Composite colours have not this advantage [of being regarded as beautiful], because, not being simple, there is no standard for estimating whether they should be called pure or impure.”

In perception, all colours are composite. There are no primary colours, except in theory. Kant’s binary is that of the noumenal and the phenomenal. The invisible and the visible. Light is invisible. We can only see the presence of light in space – i.e. colour.

Turrell has constructed chambers to stimulate a perfect homogeneous field of light – the Ganzfeld pieces to which Gasworks belongs. Within these spheres, Turrell stages colour without reference by constructing spaces without index. They are groundless fields unpunctuated by corners, skirting boards, floors and doors. This field is theatre to a cycle of colours. The viewer notices that “colour begins to fade after a few minutes of viewing.” Turrell shows us that colour cannot exist without reference to space or memory. It is the opposite phenomenon to the thickening of the sky that the Count relates of his experience in a Skyspace similar to Air Mass. He said that the colour is “ready to come out of the frame.” Yet – as we learned in Gasworks – without the frame there is nothing. The Count is not stupid. He said, “something beautiful is nearby and real.” Nearby – not quite here: over there: somewhere else. Air Mass shows us a composite of colour so resonant that we cannot but think, like the Count, of it as pure. We’re cutting the corners of the beautiful. A simple colour emerges from the complex physical relationship between the inside and the outside of Air Mass. Beauty emerges to fill the empty space.

Turrell’s art insists on duration. We must wait to watch our perceptions unfold. While we are waiting, the light itself unfolds. In Gasworks, a set cycle of different colours are presented electronically. The piece is a kind of symphony of colour, with a beginning, middle and end. It is what Kant calls “the unity of a manifold of sensations.” It may be aesthetically judged as such only in reflection – when the fifteen minutes inside the chamber are up.

Air Mass is also host to a cycle of sense impressions. This time, the cycle has not been dictated. It is the cycle of nature – the sun’s arc through the sky and the planet’s jib through the stars. To spend an hour in Air Mass while the sun is setting is to bear witness to something of inviolable beauty: the unity of a sunset’s manifold of sensations.

We can rub our experiences from Turrell’s structures against Kant’s aesthetic theory. It is harder to force them to a comprehensive fit of the mould that is finally prescribed by the full force of Kant’s arabesque on the beautiful. The work feels more comfortably aligned to the sublime.

Think of the feeling of sensory deprivation. Think of losing touch with the physical index – of the distillation of the senses: the disembodied mind. Turrell’s oeuvre concerns itself above all with the fissure between imagination and reason – the disparity upon which Kant builds his theory of the sublime.

The feeling of the sublime is… brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful.

Turrell describes viewers’ reactions to an early installation:

People got down on their hands and knees and crawled through it because they experienced intense disequilibrium… We finally had to cut a path into the floor, but even then people had trouble standing.

“When your eyes get lost,” Daniel Birmbaum points out, “your body falls.” Surely this disequilibrium is simply Kant’s momentary check to the vital forces.

The peaceful, reflective nature of Turrell’s art seems superficially removed from the crashing waves and roaring firmament that Kant describes. However, a feeling of the sublime hinges on the realisation of the inadequacy of our imagination. Turrell has taken a step beyond the traditional triggers of sublimity. His minimalist, empty spaces and sensory deprivation chambers actually situate the subject under the purest conditions for sublimation. Horrible prospects are merely the vehicle by which to access this abjection of the senses. Turrell lets us experience it first hand. In a field of finite boundaries (quantum space), his structures engender a feeling of boundless infinity (the immeasurable).

Turrell’s masterpiece is the Roden Crater. Work started in 1974. The piece remains unfinished. Turrell’s intention is to landscape a perfect parabolic cavity into the cone of a volcano, the mouth of which is as wide as Manhattan Island. Once complete, the viewer may experience the visual phenomenon known as celestial vaulting when lying face up at its deepest point. We experience an exaggeration of the sky’s enclosure of the earth. The sky seems to bowl out – to complete the crater’s hemisphere with a tangible hemisphere of its own. Indeed the sky – and therefore the edge of the world – appears to be situated no further than the edge of the crater’s rim. Turrell’s work on Roden Crater constitutes an excessive attempt to frame and control nature. He literally brings down the sky. In this respect it is similar to Air Mass. But Roden Crater functions on a scale that is truly monumental.

Interviewing Turrell for The New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins says “He tells me that it has something to do with our yearning for ‘closure’—for closed sets, finite dimensions, a human scale.” According to Kant,

The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.

Roden Crater offers its subjects the most comprehensive experience of nature. It shows us the greatest tract of sky perceivable in one intuition. Yet even in its magnitude, it remains finite because ultimately measurable. It evokes the head spinning logic of the mathematically sublime: “all that is great in nature… in turn becoming little.”

The sublime feeling is built on the ill communication between our imagination and our reason – i.e. the inadequacy of the imagination in providing for the demands of reason. The perceptual phenomenon in Roden Crater immediately provokes a feeling of this inadequacy. As we see ourselves see, earlier, so we see ourselves think. The one regards perception, the other imagination. Lyotard says, “sublime violence is like lightning. It short-circuits thinking with itself. Nature, or what is left of it, quantity, serves only to provide the bad contact that creates the spark.” As soon as the flames catch, the viewer is thrown back into himself. Indeed, this is art without objects.

Our inadequacy “compels us subjectively to think nature itself in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible, without our being able to effectuate this presentation objectively.”

The perceptual phenomenon in Roden Crater immediately provokes a feeling of inadequacy. Lyotard says, “sublime violence is like lightning. It short-circuits thinking with itself. Nature, or what is left of it, quantity, serves only to provide the bad contact that creates the spark.” This inadequacy is the ill communication between our imagination and our reason. It is the failure of the imagination in providing for the demands of reason. As Kant puts it, Roden Crater “compels us subjectively to think nature itself in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible, without our being able to effectuate this presentation objectively.”

Reason, like light, is pure. It is also invisible. We can only see the presence of light in space, as colour. Curiously, we can only trace the presence of reason in space also. Quantum space. But how to trace the concept of the infinite in quantum space? Lyotard concludes, “The teleological machine explodes.” The inadequacy of perception that may be experienced in Gasworks bears on the idea of pure light. The inadequacy of imagination that may be experienced in Roden Crater, on the other hand, bears on the confidence of self-sufficient intellectual faculties. Tension exists with the noumenal on the one hand and with the empirical on the other.

Both set us off on journeys inside ourselves. Earlier, Turrell let us see ourselves see. Now, Turrell lets us see ourselves think. Inadequacy. Reflection. Review. Turrell’s tinkering with light let me learn to respect what goes on inside my head in spite of how I felt about what was going on on the outside. Take a drop of his medicine.

Bibliography

Tomkins, Calvin: “Flying into the Light”, The New Yorker, January 13^th 2003

Turrell, James: Occluded Front, ed. Julia Brown, The Lapis Presss, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1985

Turrell, James: The Other Horizon, ed Peter Noever, MAK, 1999

Wakefield, Neville: “Walter de Maria, Measure and Substance”, Flash Art no.182 May/June 1995

Failing, Patricia: “James Turrell’s New Light on the Universe”, Artnews vol.84 no.4, April 1985

Kant, Immanuel: The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans J.C. Meredith, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1952

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